What I'm Reading

Answers

Friends, the time is at hand. A few short hours from now, the Rolling Blogfast for Peace will spread across this nation like head lice at a MoveOn.Org rally. Our noble sacrifice will open the world's eyes to the futility of Bush's war, and allow Nick Nolte to finally have a little bite to eat, for crying out loud.

I had a Russell Crowesque pep speech all prepared, but the clock is ticking and I’m sure you’re all anxious to receive your assigned fasting periods. That said, the groundswell of grassroots support petered out around 70 volunteers. In fact, I became so desperate for bodies that I unwittingly allowed active and retired military personnel to participate. How are we supposed to bring the horror of war home to the American People with all these soldiers butting in? Oh well, it’s too late to do anything about it now. The Blogfast will march on, undaunted by any right-wing attempts at sabotage. On the bright side, the light roster will let us wrap the whole shebang up early so we can watch The View. You go, Babs!

*Not to be confused with Travis Wariner of San Diego, CA; Travis Warner of San Diego, CA; Travis Warener of San Diego, CA; or Travis Werner of San Diego, CA.

Remember - and I cannot stress this enough - FASTING MEANS NO EATING. ANYTHING!! Those of you who keep sending emails asking if placentas count as food, YES THEY DO! Do not – I REPEAT – do NOT eat anything for your entire ten minutes. If anyone stumbles, if anyone falters in their duty, it will negate the entire fast. Bush will win, world peace will never be realized, and Gwyneth Paltrow will die alone the gutter. I know it’s a heavy burdern, perhaps one too heavy for non-progressives to bear. But they don’t hand out Liberal Arts degrees to limp-wristed weenies, do they? Hang tough. Fight the Power. And if you find yourself alone, riding in green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you're already dead!

The response to the Rolling BlogFast for Peace has been overwhelming. We’re up to about 60 or 70 fasters so far, and I’ll wager that a good 25% of them aren’t actually undercover FBI agents. Indeed, my emailbox is packed with requests from socially conscious progressives anxious to starve themselves for world peace and Ed Asner. Here’s a quick look at just the first hour of participants:

Thanks to JannyMae, Prince Mugambe, Mr. Penis, and everyone else who has volunteered and/or offered me a free credit report. I will post a full roster of particicipants on Tuesday night.

I’d like to address a few concerns some hesitant readers have expressed before committing themselves to the monumental task ahead of us. First of all, some have requested a specific time slot, or that their 10 minutes don't run consecutively, or the opportunity to pick a specific celebrity that they’d like to starve themsleves for. I’m sorry, but such nonsense would only encourage individualistic behavior. This is a collective effort on a collectivist blog. If you must think for yourself, go do it on Little Green Turdballs.

Others have been a little more creative in how they would like to show their support. Reader Matt Reilly promised not to eat any celebrities between now and the day BushHitler is brought to justice. A noble sacrifice, but perhaps an unrealistic one. You never know when you might be snowbound in the Himalayas with the cast of The West Wing. Trapped for months without any food, a voluntary fast for peace would become a promise you'd live to regret. In time, you'd forget you made it at all. Then one day, as the snow begins to melt from Mt. Kilamanjaro (thanks to Bush's refusal to ratify Kyoto) a rescue team would find you alone amongst a pile of half-eaten celebrities, gnawing the last vestiges of gristle off of Martin Sheen's Emmy-winning femur. So much for World Peace then, eh Matt?

Other readers have asked whether publishing their names and cities of residence is very wise, considering what the Bush Junta does to dissenters. I confess I never really thought about that. In my selfless desire to end the war and save Ben Affleck from starvation, I may have unwittingly handed Bush what amounts to a "hit list". Personally, I’m not afraid of publishing my name, but I couldn’t live with myself if any of my readers woke up at Gitmo one morning with urine stains on their Holy Quran. So if anyone prefers that I not publish their full name, let me know and I’ll just print your first name and last initial.

Finally, to cover my legal backside, I must ask that anyone who is pregnant and hasn’t yet had an abortion please refrain from participating in the Rolling BlogFast. I’m sorry to exclude you from the party, but that’s the price you pay for not exercising your Right to Choose.

Most patriotic progressives were against Bush’s illegal and immoral war on terror before it even began, but the rest of America needs more convincing. The constant barrage of pro-Bush propaganda from the mainstream media has blinded them to the truth, and closed their minds to our hysterical screeching. Compounding their blissful ignorance is Bush’s refusal to parade the flag-draped corpses of dead soldiers across our TV screens, thus shielding ordinary Americans from the real Cost of War, and denying MoveOn.Org any footage for their TV spots. Well, the Hollywood Community says “NO MORE!” In the spirit of the powerfully effective hunger strikes held by civil rights leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, and Mary-Kate Olsen, socially-conscious celebrities have pledged to “bring the suffering of pain and war home” in a “rolling fast” – a relay in which some our most beloved entertainers will take turns starving themselves for 24 hours. On the surface, Susan Sarandon skipping dinner at Spago may seem like nothing compared to having both your legs blown off by a roadside bomb, but when you factor in that the Beautiful People are 100 times more important than your average grunt, their sacrifices come out about even.

Applying that same mathematical formula to the progressive blogosphere, I invite my readers to join me in a day of fasting as not just a protest against the war, but a show of support for our beloved Hollywood entertainers who are putting their own health and wonderful good looks on the line in order to stop it. Liberal Larry’s Rolling BlogFast will show the world that we are tired of war, fed up with the killing, and sick of our living national treasures having to take time out from promoting their latest film to demoralize America.

Here’s how it’s going to work: July 12th – one week from today - will be divided up into 144 ten-minute increments. Everyone who joins up will be assigned their own 10-minute period in which they will refrain from eating. YOU MUST NOT EAT FOR THE ENTIRE TEN MINUTES. Once your 10 minutes are up, you will “pass the fast” on to the next reader, who will NOT EAT ANY FOOD AT ALL for TEN WHOLE MINUTES.

Remember, it’s very important that you DO NOT EAT ANY FOOD AT ALL during the entire ten minutes allotted to you. If just one person slips up and eats a Twinkie, the right-wing hate-o-sphere will sink their claws into it and make our whole effort look like a great big joke. My advice would be to gorge yourself just prior to your 10-minute commitment, and to refrain from smoking any glaucoma medication lest you get the munchies.

I will take the first ten minutes, 12:00 am to 12:10 am. I figure if I can then get all my readers on board, I can fill up the first two hours. We’ll see. On the night of the 11th, I will post the entire list of participants so you’ll know when you’ll be fasting. Those whose 10 minutes fall in the hours of sleep will have the toughest time, for they’ll have to set their alarm so they can wake up and not eat. Then there will be nobody around to witness their courageous act of self-sacrifice. It almost defeats the whole purpose. But if Sean Penn can do without the publicity, so can we.

Email me your name and city of residence and I’ll assign you your ten-minute period. I encourage other bloggers to participate as well, if you aren’t too busy hosting a Carnival Of the Cats or some other thinly-veiled ploy to sucker in some extra traffic.

They wear ribbons for AIDS victims. They join marches for cop killers. And now, they are skipping a couple meals for world peace. We can never repay Hollywood icons for the horrible suffering they constantly endure for us, but if I can get 144 people to join in on my BlogFast, perhaps together we will bring this war to a quick end so Ed Asner won’t have to pass up a single pork chop.

It’s finals time again at Evergreen State College, so blogging has been and will continue to be light. As a Professym of Midget Studies and the Kama Sutra, I’ve been terribly busy all week giving my students their quarterly exams. Trying to get their tiny feet up into the stirrups is no easy task, let me tell you. One would think that the little tykes would be a tad more flexible, what with the stretching exercises we've been doing all year. But apparently some individuals would rather party through the whole semester than do their assigned homework. Such disregard for the value of higher education is becoming increasingly typical of each generation of little people that I teach. Sometimes I wonder if there is any hope for midgetkind at all.

I don't do "guest bloggers", but in light of the recent confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, I've reluctantly agreed to Sen. Kennedy's request to submit one final article on the subject. - Lar.

This morning, after gorging myself upon the flesh of your young, I phoned Justice Alito personally to congratulate him on his appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, and to invite him out for leisurely drive around a pretty little pond near Martha’s Vineyard. If he accepts, we may still be able to continue the long March of Progress that my brothers Jack and Bobby began when they freed the slaves. Unlike Bush’s FEMA, however, I believe it is best to prepare for the worst.

Anticipating a conservative push to reinstate slavery, or a Katrina-style ethnic-cleansing attack on our own fair city, Sen. Kerry and I are establishing a sort of “underground railroad” to smuggle our precious African-American citizens safely out of Boston. We’ll begin with the upper-income, gated communities first and then work our way down to the ghettos. Until such a time that they can be evacuated, all men and women of color are advised to stay out of Boston’s country clubs, finer dining establishments, and any other areas where they could easily be spotted by Alito’s racist stormtroopers.

In addition, I will also be welcoming as many of Boston’s nubile young women of childbearing age into my home, where I can more adequately defend them against anti-choice religious fanatics. Safely inside the confines of the Kennedy compound, women will be free to frolic in the nude and have wild, unprotected sex with 400 pounds of choice Irish beefcake. They will not be treated like second-class citizens, but respected, embraced, and fondled as equals. Space is limited, so please: no fat chicks.

As I was trying to explain to my fellow congresspersons Monday evening before I was shot with tranquilizer darts, fitted with a radio collar, and released back into the wild, the Founding Fathers botched the Constitution when they wrote slavery into the original document. Don’t bother looking; progressive Supreme Court justices handpicked by wise and noble leaders like my brother have since removed it. It was my sincerest hope that in the wake of Justices Rehnquist and O’Connor’s untimely deaths, George Bush would have appointed replacements that were unafraid to make a few corrections to the Bill of Rights in the name of social progress. Preferably someone like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, only with nicer breasts. Instead, we got Heinrich Bleeping Himmler.

Weep, my friends, for the summer of love is over, and the long, dark winter of our discontent has begun.

I regretfully announce that tomorrow's "2000 KIA" celebration has been postponed due to lack of troop participation.

I know, I know. I'm just as disappointed as you are. We've all waited patiently for the number of U.S. casualties in Iraq to reach a nice, round number that would sound good in anti-war slogans. I spent a fortune on a giant order of custom-made "Bush Lied, 2000 Died!" party hats, each emblazoned in gold leaf with the name of a soldier who died for Bush's lies. Our own Congressman Jim McDermott hoped to get naked and chain himself to the Hammering Man, and the passing of this grim milestone would have given him a perfect excuse. But thanks to a few stubborn holdouts, the official body count is hovering at an awkward 1,996. It doesn't even rhyme with anything! It's almost as if the troops are purposely staying alive just to spoil our efforts to throw Bush out of office.

Don't put your peace hookahs and pink dashikis back in hock yet, though. If our luck holds out, there will be a major Iraqi offensive this week that will put us over the top. A roadside explosive device or a suicide bomber and we're back in business. It's an opportunity that won't come again until we hit 3000, and the number of casualties in Iraq exceeds those from 9/11, thus rendering the entire War on Terror a pointless exercise in futility.

I'd like to thank everyone for their kind comments and emails last week, and for being patient while I took a few days off to say goodbye to my great Uncle Robert Chomstein. The Navajo people knew him as Naadåa DaaNeéaNaa Néé, or "He Who Reeks of Bongwater", and although he was simply "Uncle Bob" to me, he was much more than just an uncle. He was a mentor. A sage. The last of a dying race of progressive giants who ushered in the civil rights movement with an enlightened cocktail of psychedelic drugs, free love, and congenital herpes.

Indeed, my own political philosophy has its roots in Uncle Bob's little geodesic dome on the banks of the Rio Grande, and my return to Santa Fe last weekend conjured up old childhood memories of summers spent frolicking naked amongst the pinyoned arroyos with the horned lizards, the mournful cries of ancient Pueblo ghosts shouting at me to get off their property floating on the warm New Mexico winds. Now, thanks to Bush's refusal to ratify Kyoto, the winds will sear the flesh right off your bones, and the pinyons have all gone the way of old man Zozobra - burned to ashes like so many civil liberties during a Republican administration.

An environmental and political activist before activism would get you a one-way ticket to Gitmo, Uncle Bob was deeply involved with the American Indian Movement, and it was not unusual to see such Native American heroes as Ward Churchill, Jane Fonda, and Skip Stevenson gathered around the family hooka on a warm summer night, the firelight seeming to deepen the lines in their noble Indian visages. War wounds, perhaps. Scars collected from a lifetime of suffering at the hands of offensive sports logos, racist cartoon characters, and humiliating cigar store sculptures.

Uncle Bob was also an accomplished Native American artist. Unlike the traitorous slime he had dubbed "Uncle Tomahawks", Bob refused to steal precious silver and turqouise from the sacred womb of Gaia. Instead, you'd find typically him at Santa Fe's vibrant Indian Market every weekend, peddling his charming kokopelli figurines fashioned from ear wax and cat turds. He was a regular fixture at the Plaza for many years, until the intolerant wasicu in the city health department forced him out of business. His passing, however, is certain to increase the value of his works, and I've already seen a few of his lint and pubic hair dreamweavers fetching upwards of six dollars a piece on eBay.

The last time I saw him, Uncle Bob was already showing signs of the senile dementia that would ultimately claim his life, and it made him an easy target for Republican hucksters and scam artists who prey on the weak and feeble. I can still recall poring through his piles of unopened utility statements to discover a $950 electricity bill. How a man who lived in a solar powered home could be charged that much for electricity was beyond me, but when I brought it to his attention he merely gave me his trademark toothless grin an nodded knowingly.

"Coyote workum for Enron," he'd say with a wink. "Now come, young papoose! We call Pow Wow. Have big backyard Fire Dance before DEA Kachinas findum basement crop of glaucoma medicine!" Even as his health failed him, Uncle Bob was always thinking of others. And hundreds came from all over the reservation last Friday to show their gratitude and pay him their final respects.

In case you were wondering what was up with my half-assed posts the past couple of days, there has been a death in the Chomstein family. I won't be blogging while I attend to funeral arrangements, drawing down of the sun and the moon, annointing of the ceremonial orifice, etc. When I return next week, I hope to be back to my regular full-assed blogging schedule.

Charity, by its very nature, is best left to nurturing progressive leaders who are far better qualified to distribute our income than we are. Unfortunately, the government has been hijacked by stingy conservatives who think only of themselves. It's therefore up to us, as liberals, to show America that we can be just as "charitible" with our own money as we can with everyone else's. That being said, there are several noteworthy progressive causes that deserve our support.

In this time of unprecedented pain and suffering, it's important to have one's priorities straight. That's why Planned Parenthood of America will be distributing free contraceptives to survivors of Hurricane Katrina, along with a coupon for 30% off their next abortion. Seniors and girls under 15 will get an additional 15% discount, and an "I went to New Orleans and all I got was an Intact Dilation & Extraction" t-shirt.

Andrew Sullivan refuses to donate a single dime to a state that doesn't recognize same-sex marriage, but Oliver Willis is calling on his readers to help him rack up a few political brownie points over right-wing bloggers who give purely for selfish reasons. Perhaps they think "God" will forgive their years of anti-tax initiatives and SUV-driving with a few million dollars in blood money. Anyway, Ollie will be setting up a booth outside his home this weekend, and anyone who wants to drop by and pressure-wash his back for a good cause is more than welcome.

AFL-CIO president John Sweeney has announced a special fund for hurricane-stricken union members, and screw everyone else. Eligible recipients are encouraged to show their union credentials as they float past the AFL-CIO of Greater New Orleans headquarters. Donations can be sent to the AFL-CIO's Union Community and Screw Everyone Else Fund, or directly to the Democrat Party.

Jonesin' for some Corpse Porn? AmericaBlog has teamed up with the PEN American Center to offer 8 x 10 glossies of dead Katrina victims for five bucks a pop. With Bush's prohibition of Flag-Draped Coffin Parades on the evening news, and now FEMA's fascist refusal to allow journalists to take snapshots of bloated human carcasses, it's getting increasingly difficult for inquiring progressives to get their rocks off. Thanks to Americablog for providing this valuable community service.

On a more serious note, loyal reader and Right-Wing Extremist Bunker Mulligan passed away recently. He was a proud Texan, an avid golfer, and served his country in the United States Navy - but we won't hold any of those against him. Even though he left us last June and I just now got around to discovering it, I could always count on Bunker's sense of humor and he will be missed. His family has asked that memorials be sent to Homes for Our Troops.

Mother returned to Camp Larry this morning, surfing on a veritible tsusami of Grief Mojo. With her head held high and her bong even higher, she looked more the conquering heroine than a woman who has lost both a son and a brother to Bush's pointless "war on terror".

Shortly after getting kicked out of Jersey's Sports Bar for "Giving everyone the creeps", the whole hootenanny moved up the block to the Gold Star Tavern, bringing mother 50 yards closer to the Coward in Crawford and even harder for him to ignore. With hundreds of supporters arriving each day to bask in Mother's aura of Absolute Moral Authority, Bush will soon have no choice but to end this immoral war and legalize marijuana. On Sunday, we were even treated to a visit by the great Neil Young, who staggered into the tavern and performed an impromptu rendition of his timeless anti-war ballad, I'm Not Neil Young, You Stupid Hippies before passing out atop the Huggy Bears for Peace display.

Brilliantly conceived by mother herself, Huggy Bears for Peace was originally intended to honor each one of our fallen heroes with a teddy bear in his/her name, as a poignant reminder of their brave sacrifice for a just and noble cause. But with the number of Iraqi Freedom Fighters killed in action climbing into the tens of thousands, we decided it would be more feasible to simply honor our murderous troops with the instead. In essence, the huge pile of over 1,800 teddy bears would convey to the American sheeple that our troops are not valiant warriors marching off to defend our country, but rather innocent babes torn from the arms of their loving mothers by fascist military recruiters. Plus, it'd be great for photo-ops.

The right-wing cromags, of course, would have nothing of this beautiful symbol of love and respect for our genital-mocking, Quran-mishandling troops. Huggy Bears for Peace was up for less than two days before the hateful neocons started flooding in and stealing the stuffed bears right from the pile. 'MY SON WAS NOT A HUGGY BEAR!" one firebreathing jingoist growled at my poor, grieving mother. "HE WAS A UNITED STATES MARINE, AND DAMN PROUD OF IT!" We never laughed so hard in our entire lives.

It never ceases to amaze me how these chickhawks will force their own toddlers to help Bush steal Iraq's oil but won't sign up themselves. Even the Shrub refuses to send his daughters over to fight, a tradition that great war presidents have honored for over two hundred years. Who can forget the awe-inspiring images of Chelsea Clinton flying bombing missions over Sarajevo? Apparently the right-wing media can, because they never bothered to report it.

Anyway, I'm probably going to stay away from Camp Larry for a while, so don't expect any more updates. With Mom now the media darling, the place is beginning to fill with some real nutjob radicals. A heated argument broke out this afternoon as to whether we were entitled to the 79 free virgins when we died. Certainly we've done our part to end this silly war and rid the muslim holy land of kufr once and for all, but I'm pretty sure that we have to actually die in the process of killing infidels to qualify for the 79 virgins package in the afterlife. I can already hear the right-wingers questioning our patriotism should we begin Martyrdom Operations for Peace!

No, best leave that up to the professionals. Besides, I doubt you could find 17 Seattle-area women who died as virgins, let alone 79 - and they were probably virgins for a reason. My Great Aunt Hilda died a virgin because she looked like Abe Vigoda. Call me superficial, but I'm not sure I want to spend eternity with a harem of 79 naked Vigodas. Susan Sontags, perhaps...but they'd have to shave their backs.